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Top Korean Search Engines Announce New Mobile Algorithms

Global Marketing News – 2nd July 2015

Top Korean search engines announce new mobile algorithms

Two of South Korea’s top search engines have announced major algorithm updates to help deliver a more personalised search experience to mobile users.

Naver has announced the launch of its “tag-search” service, which will rank mobile search results based on the type of content that a user has liked and commented on in the past.

Daum Kakao has also launched a similar service. Its new algorithm, called RUBICS, ranks mobile search results based on pages that a user has clicked on and spent a lot of time on previously.

The social messaging app Kakao Talk has also stepped into the mobile search arena, having launched its own mobile search engine called Channel.

South Korea is one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world, with smartphone penetration at over 100%.

Amazon offers business loans in 8 new countries

Amazon has extended its business loan services to 8 new countries.

Amazon, which previously only offered loans to companies in the US and Japan, will now offer loans worth between 1,000 and 600,000 US dollars to small-to-medium sized businesses in Canada, the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, China and India.

The service will operate on an invite-only basis, with businesses being selected by an algorithm based on the popularity of their products, their inventory cycles and how often they run out of stock.

Amazon is not the only ecommerce giant to have launched a business loan program. eBay and the Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba have also got their own business loan schemes, with Alibaba having recently extended loans to customers in the US and UK.

In a separate development, Amazon has said it will be expanding the range of services it offers in Mexico. Currently it just operates its Amazon e-books service in the country.

Most popular social network for Japanese women revealed

A study by Bwrite and Skets has revealed that Line is the most popular social network in Japan among young women.

A staggering 94% of Japanese women aged 20-29 use Line, falling to 74% in the 30-39 age range and just 51% of women aged 40-49. Across all ages, 70% of Japanese female internet users used Line.

This puts Line ahead of the other social giants Facebook and Twitter, with 67% of respondents saying they use Facebook, and 61% saying they use Twitter.

Despite Line’s popularity, however, the social network does not seem to be a good one for brands wanting to reach a Japanese female audience. Only 41% said they followed brands on Line, compared to 45% who said they did so on Twitter and 52% who said they did so on Facebook.

Chinese brands dominate MIT list of “smartest” companies

Several Chinese companies have appeared in Technology Review – MIT’s list of the top 50 “smartest” companies globally.

The American company Tesla Motors took place, but Xiaomi came in second place. Xiaomi, which made its name selling smartphones, is now also involved in the ecommerce and software development sectors.

The Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba took fourth place, while its rival Tencent took seventh place. Tencent is best known in China for its social network WeChat, which has around 550 million monthly users.

Netflix, Google, Amazon also came in the top 15, with Facebook making the top 30, and IBM, Snapchat, Microsoft and Uber also making it into the top 50.

eBay and PayPal split imminent

And finally, eBay and PayPal are soon due to separate.

eBay users will not be faced with any significant changes, however. All sellers must still offer PayPal as a payment option, and it remains eBay’s preferred payment method.

eBay and PayPal will also continue to share data about customers, as they already do currently, to help prevent fraud and provide as smooth a customer experience as possible.

As the Research Manager of multilingual web marketing agency Webcertain, Immanuel heads up the company’s global market research activities and large content marketing projects. He is the author of several reports and guides, including ‘The Essential Guide to Rel-Alternate-Hreflang’ and ‘The Webcertain Global Search and Social Report 2013’. Apart from being a tutor at the International Marketing School -- teaching online marketing professionals on business opportunities around the globe -- Immanuel is a regular speaker at the International Search Summit, a leading event series dedicated to multilingual search and social media marketing.